PUBLIC OPINION by WALTER LIPPMANN TO FAYE LIPPMANN ...

had only begun. For back home the editors, the board of trade, the
central federated union, and the women's clubs had spared themselves
these labors, and were prepared to view the Congressman's performance
through local spectacles.
6
What patronage did to attach political chieftains to the national
government, the infinite variety of local subsidies and privileges do
for self-centered communities. Patronage and pork amalgamate and
stabilize thousands of special opinions, local discontents, private
ambitions. There are but two other alternatives. One is government by
terror and obedience, the other is government based on such a highly
developed system of information, analysis, and self-consciousness that
"the knowledge of national circumstances and reasons of state" is
evident to all men. The autocratic system is in decay, the voluntary
system is in its very earliest development; and so, in calculating the
prospects of association among large groups of people, a League of
Nations, industrial government, or a federal union of states, the
degree to which the material for a common consciousness exists,
determines how far cooperation will depend upon force, or upon the
milder alternative to force, which is patronage and privilege. The
secret of great state-builders, like Alexander Hamilton, is that they
know how to calculate these principles.
CHAPTER XIX
THE OLD IMAGE IN A NEW FORM: GUILD SOCIALISM.
Whenever the quarrels of self-centered groups become unbearable,
reformers in the past found themselves forced to choose between two
great alternatives. They could take the path to Rome and impose a
Roman peace upon the warring tribes. They could take the path to
isolation, to autonomy and self-sufficiency. Almost always they chose
that path which they had least recently travelled. If they had tried
out the deadening monotony of empire, they cherished above all other
things the simple freedom of their own community. But if they had seen
this simple freedom squandered in parochial jealousies they longed for
the spacious order of a great and powerful state.
Whichever choice they made, the essential difficulty was the same. If
decisions were decentralized they soon floundered in a chaos of local
opinions. If they were centralized, the policy of the state was based
on the opinions of a small social set at the capital. In any case
force was necessary to defend one local right against another, or to